Heather Stewart

35% of over 65s.

Wow.

You know, we're very divided on this, but in a way that seems to favour, you know, an increasing weight behind the idea of rejoining over time.

I suspect it will take quite a long time.

I don't think we're talking about the next two, three, five years.

I could be wrong.

I think it's a longer term project than that.

There was an interview with Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission that the Financial Times did recently.

And he said that there's still a feeling in the EU that people were kind of the phrase he used was wounded by Brexit.

You know, there was a feeling that we'd sort of done some damage to the whole project by leaving.

And if you're the EU, do you want to sit down and expend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of political capital on drawing up a deal with the UK, a notoriously sort of fractious and unreliable part?

You know, we've not been a great negotiating partner.

Well, I think that it would be a publicity coup for the project, right?

To say, you know, I think it was a sadness that we left.

I think you'd also have to confront, you'd have to say to the public, well, we're going back to free movement, which we've talked about how toxic the immigration debate, it feels like we're quite a long way to go.

I mean, you have to wonder why the EU would sit down with us, because if you're them, you're looking at the opinion polls in Britain and you're thinking, well, it looks like there might be a Farage government.

Why would you spend a single nanosecond?

really, doing a deal with the UK that you would know that a right wing government might unpick as soon as it could.

So I think there would have to be a really settled opinion in the UK that we wanted to go back.

You could have a Labour manifesto that said, we will open negotiations to rejoin, I suppose.